When I’m not busy editing the Oldie magazine, I live near Towcester in south Northamptonshire where things are pretty unexciting. It’s at a place called Stoke Park, where two 17th-century pavilions, originally a chapel and a library linked by colonnades to the sides of a substantial country house, survived a fire that destroyed the main
It has taken years, but finally England has joined the rest of the United Kingdom and other countries around the world in declaring war on the plastic carrier bag. This week for the first time English supermarkets are being forbidden by law to give plastic bags away for free. From now on they will have
When Robert Peston, the economics editor of the BBC, interviewed George Osborne on television in an open-necked shirt with collar awry and a wisp of chest hair on display, he was subjected to a barrage of criticism to which he responded with vigour. It was ‘bonkers’ to suggest that wearing a tie made a journalist
It’s hard to turn on the television nowadays without being shown a robot. It might be looking like a grasshopper doing something terribly important, such as helping a surgeon with an operation, or just be a cute little metal humanoid designed to make schoolchildren more interested in their studies. One robot I saw on TV
How do you address extraterrestrials in outer space? The main problem with this is that there may not be any extraterrestrials out there to address. The next problem is that, if there are any, they will be unimaginably far away. According to Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, the nearest star
I remember Sidney Blumenthal from my time in Washington in the late 1980s when I was there as the first American editor of the Independent. He was a smartly dressed, agreeable political journalist, handsome in a donnish kind of way, who had a gracious, dignified manner that seemed to put him a cut above most
While the Germans were raining bombs on London during the second world war, the architects’ department of London County Council was busy colouring in Ordnance Survey maps of the city to record which buildings had been destroyed and which had not. These maps have now been published as a book by Thames and Hudson, The
We learn from a new report that children in England are among the unhappiest in the world — more unhappy, even, than the children of Ethiopia, Algeria or Israel. Why should this be so? Life is still quite good in England. It is generally peaceful and prosperous. Yet, in the admittedly rather haphazard list of
I was saying the other week that my new hearing aids had come with a warning not to swallow their batteries, because this could be bad for you. I doubt if anyone would choose to swallow a battery, but such warnings against barely conceivable eventualities are now commonplace. Manufacturers rack their brains to think of
I’m going off Jeremy Corbyn. He seems more and more pleased with himself by the minute. But I understand why he is so popular with Labour supporters. It isn’t just his perceived authenticity in a field of machine politicians — the same attribute that has thrust Donald Trump to the fore in the race for
Most people, when asked if they would rather be deaf or blind, say they would rather be deaf. I would say that, too. Deafness is obviously a wretched and isolating condition, but it appears to be less absolute in its effects than blindness. A blind person simply can’t see anything. With the deaf it is
I was wondering what to write about this week when I suddenly realised that exactly 40 years ago this Saturday I became editor of this magazine. Despite eventually getting the sack, I hung onto the job for nine years, from 1975 to 1984, which is still the longest that anyone has had it since Wilson
The smart phone is a wonderful thing. We are never out of touch anymore, neither with friends nor with the world at large. But increasingly we read of the harm that it is doing us. We are no longer its masters but its victims. It makes us tense, anxious and insecure. We respond with unnatural
I have always been what I suppose one could call a weed, and a cowardly one at that. I never liked sports and was never any good at them. When fielding at cricket at my prep school, I used to while away time making daisy-chains. Of my part in football one prep-school report merely said,
The 1960s were already more than halfway over when I realised that I was living through what was supposed to be an exciting decade. I had got married, found a job, had two babies and was leading the stressful life of a young family man, quite unaware that all around me Britain was bubbling with
The Eurostar train descended gently into the Channel Tunnel, went halfway along it, and then stopped. There it remained for what seemed a very long time, the silence broken only occasionally by mumbled announcements in French and English. The speaker was French, and his English was incomprehensible, his French only slightly less so. All that
It is nearly two years since the police were granted new powers to fine motorists for ‘hogging’ the middle lane of a motorway, but it’s only now that anyone has been convicted in court of this offence. A person driving a van at 60 mph on the M62 near Huddersfield has been fined £500 and
My friend Alan Rusbridger has just given up editing the Guardian after a distinguished 20-year reign that has climaxed, as befits an accomplished musician and former chair of Britain’s National Youth Orchestra, with a magnificent crescendo of earthshaking scoops. He has now, at 61, ascended to more serene heights as chairman of the Scott Trust,
It’s June, and the country-house summer opera festivals are now in full swing. Glyndebourne, which opened the season last month, has now been joined by its leading emulators — Garsington in Oxfordshire, The Grange in Hampshire and Longborough in Gloucestershire; and next month a newcomer, Winslow Hall Opera in Buckinghamshire, will be putting on La
I wrote last week about a swarm of bees that had attached itself to a wall of my house, as if this were a rare and momentous event; but since then there have been three more swarms, and the men in spacesuits have been back again to remove them. Well, they’ve actually removed only two
